This is the sequel to the book Daemon which swept around the office when it came out. If you are at all in the gaming or technology/web industry, I highly suggest that you find the time to read these two books. They are a ton of fun, mashing up many of the trends and conspiracies in technology. (augmented reality, HUDs, social reputation, energy independence, farm subsidies, genetic engineering, financial shenanigans, covert government actions, MMOs, virtual currencies, digital trust, security, privacy, etc).
The best part about this two part book series is that like all good stories (in my mind) the good guys and the bad guys switch places constantly. You can easily see both sides of the story and as more layers are pealed back, your sympathies and perspective changes. By the end, the main character is asked to make a very clear choice... a choice that causes one pause as we wonder if we would make the same choice.
This book is timely in that it illustrates how pervasive technology is, how trusted it is, and how in many cases that trust is required, and in some cases how that trust is very misplaced. I think that main take away is that we shouldn't be scared of the transparency as long as we can demand equal transparency from those that would use i that trust against us. The challenge comes when the actions and decisions of the population are known and therefore controllable, and the actions of others are not... or purposely kept secretive due to dogmatic assumptions that just because something is the way that it is now, means it should be conserved.
And that is the one thing I walk away from after reading Freedom(tm). When we look around at our world... whether it is the energy industry, the food industry, the financial industry, the education industry, the medical industry... the government industry... these are LARGE industries that have been incrementally built over decades. Because of that, there are some serious flaws and organizational debt inside them. If you are a programmer, imagine a software program that you might have been working on for dozens of decades... how much "technical debt" do you think would be in that sucker? But you would be stuck. There would be inefficiencies that you could just never get rid of because they would be too disruptive to everything else. I find this in software that has only been worked on for a year or so. Inefficiencies become assumptions which become dependencies which become necessities.
And that is where we are in many aspects of our world. The author gives us a glimpse of what a total reboot would look like... and in the cases where it relies on the best of us, it looks great. In the cases where it does not protect us from the worst of us, it looks terrible.
In the end... I feel stuck. The opportunity is there... but it will simply be too disruptive to really get there. So what will probably happen is we won't change. Until that disruption comes in the form of some external event that forces us to disrupt. Until then, we are all just too comfortable.
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